While I would still like to read a book about Delhi by a native, this is a really winning combination travelogue/history. Dalrymple begins with some low-hanging fruit in depicting his unreasonable landlady and India's impenetrable bureaucracy -- landlords and bureaucracy being two of the worst things in any culture -- but from there he clearly sets out to speak to a variety of people and let them tell their own stories: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs; taxi drivers, academics, mystics. He also (mostly) vividly relays 800 or so years of history, with a particular interest toward architecture and legend/storytelling. By the end, even his landlady gets a redemptive moment.